Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
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The central flaws of universal basic income
STEWART McGILL argues that to there is no version of this fashionable modern take on welfare payments that will work, with it either costing far too much in tax or delivering far loo little for recipients
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
When gas company bosses gorged on assets, the GMB union fought back with the help of a 20-stone saddleback sow. MAT COWARD tells the story
JOHN REES looks at why the June 20 international anti-war conference is such a vital initiative
ROGER McKENZIE highlights how health workers in DRC are struggling to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak in a region already suffering conflict, aid cuts and a legacy of imperialist degradation
Associate Professor BUI QUANG TUAN explains how modernisation and growth are helping to unlock new foreign investment in the Vietnamese economy
AT its most simple universal basic income (UBI) is a government programme in which every adult citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular, unconditional basis. The current range of proposals are probably best understood as a patchwork of possibilities rather than a single idea or policy, but it’s basically about giving money to solve social and economic problems.
UBI has a specious appeal and its advocates sometimes speak of it as the catholicon that will save capitalism from itself. However, some of the problems are signalled by its own advocates.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, write that UBI’s establishment would allow workers to have “the option to choose whether to take a job or not (but)... if the payment isn’t high enough to let people to refuse work, UBI might push wages down and create more ‘bullshit jobs.’”
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